RWH051: Master of Change w/ Brad Stulberg
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You're listening to T, I, P. Pie, folks. It's great to be back with you here on the Richard wise are happy a podcast. As you and I both know, we've been going through a period of extreme change and uncertainty in the world wherever you look IT seems like everything's getting shake on up politically, economically, socially, technologically.

Just look at the tumultuous, polarized and highly charged political situation here in the ted states or look at the geopolitical crisis in the middle st. In ukraine. At the same time, we're experiencing the destabilizing forces of increasingly extreme weather events, and technological advances are transforming the way we live and work at a speed that almost takes your breath away.

Given the rise of artificial intelligence, cy IT seems certain that th Epace o f c hange t hat w e're a lready e xperiencing i s o nly g oing t o a ccelerate f aced w ith t his m ale s tream o f c hange a nd u ncertainty, how can you and I maintain in our emotional equilibrium and up mental clarity, so that is possible to think, connect wisely? How can we be calm and baLanced so that we can not only make smart decisions in markets and in life, but can also provide a measure of stability and reassurance and sanity to the people who depend on us? In fact, three of my book, richer, was a happier.

I focusing some depth on this fundamental problem, that everything changes and that the future is unnoted. And yet we still need to make decisions that will hopefully position as well for the future. As you may recall, the main character in that chapter is how IT Marks to oversee two hundred billion dollars ital.

How IT told me. It's clear that the world is changing all the time, unpredictably, an incredible speed. Nothing is the same anymore, he said.

And for people whose approach to life is based on same's ss, that must be very upsetting, as how IT explained to, it's crucially important to recognize that change is inevitable and that we can expect to control our environment. Instead, he says, we have to accommodate to our environment. We have to expect and go with change.

This subjective of how to handle change in instability and disorder is the central theme of today's episode of the podcast, I guess, is brad style bug, the author of an excEllent book titled master of change. The subtitle of his book is how to excel when everything is changing, including you. Before that, brad rod by sela titled the practice of grounded ness, which explores the importance of maintaining a mental and physical wealth ing under any circumstances so we can achieve healthy and sustainable success.

Bad is also renowned coach to elite performance, including cees trees, nex lites. They has a lot of practical atal test wisdom, how to Operate successfully at the very highest levels. As you're hear in this conversation, bad is extremely thoughts about the kind of resilient all weather mindset we need in order to adapt and try them up any conditions.

He talks in detail about the most effective habits and routines that can help us to thrive no matter what, and makes a compelling case for maintaining a realistic yet hopeful attitude, even in the most chAllenging circumstances, a mindset that the great psychologist and physical hicor Frankl described as tragic optimism. I hope you find our conversation is helpful and grounding and empowering, as I did. Thanks so much for your us. You're listening to the richer. Why is a happy a podcast where your host will him Green interviews the world's greatest investors and explains how to win in markets and life.

Hi, fox. Are absolutely delighted to be here today with, I guess, brad starbuck. Brad is a leading expert on how to thrive, a mid change and disorder and disruption is the author of two best selling books.

First, the practice of grounded, which I have here, which the subtitle, a transformative path, the success that feeds, not crushes your soul. And second, a more recent book, which is also excEllent, which is gold master of change. And the subtitle is how to excel when everything is changing, including you.

So in many ways, this is a practical guide on how to excel in a world of disruption, and we are seeing this on every side. So also, brad is a coach. He works with hy performers, including top executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, athletes and like. And it's a lovely time of hair bread. I'm really delighted to see you today.

It's an honor to be here, William.

We gonna talk a lot about how to thrive amid change in disorder and uncertainty. And I wanted to stop by asking you about your own experience of change in the last decade. Basically, I know that you've had a number of experiences that LED you to see the changing disorder as you write, not the exceptions. They are the rules. What happened in the last few years before this book came out that in a way, prepared you for this sin sight that really all of us are going to have to learn to adapt to change, because it's not a glitch in the system.

is here to stay. yeah. So a multitude factors, I think, converge that LED me to this question of change in general, at least this topic of change to explore.

In my personal life, I left a very secure job where I was on staff as a performance coach at one of the largest healthcare systems in the world to develop my own private practice in coaching and spend more time writing. That coincided with a move across the country from the same Frances go bara to ashville, north CarOlina. So from a major population center to a much smaller mountain town.

I became a father for the first time, and then again for the second time, I had a book become an international best seller. And I also had some writing projects that I was very hopeful for completely fail. And then I experienced in injury that took me out of enduring sports, particularly running in travelled, that had been A A very large part of my identity and and how I saw myself, a condition in my cafe really LED to a very early premature retirement from all competitive in dance sports.

And then, of course, there were the societal changes, some of which are rather unique to being in american. There is the geopolitical shift, the election of downe d trump in two thousand and sixteen. Then there's the corona nineteen virus in pandemic.

So I was living through all of these personal changes than these societal changes. And I shared my experience with colleagues, friends, neighbor's other focus in the community. And the first thing I got was a whole lot of empathy.

IT wasn't just me, as so many people feel like th Epace o f c hange h as r eally a ccelerated b oth i n p ersonal a nd p rofessional i n s ociety, i'm sure to get into IT. I have some hythe's for why people feel that way. But ultimate in, I am someone that doesn't really like change.

I thrive when things are stable. And one of the first things that I learned in my research is that it's not just me. All living organisms thrive when we have stability.

The second thing that I learned in my research is that the average adult goes through more than thirty five major life changes. So there's a paradox there that we tend to feel our best when there's stability. Yet none of us really have very much lasting stability in our life at all.

And I felt very much stuck between extremes of trying to deny and resist change and clinton stability, which just seem to lead to restlessness and angst. Version says, completely throwing one hands up and saying, i'm just gonna with the flow and completely surrender, which isn't really in my nature and and is not in the nation of so many people. And that really let me into this exploration of why we conceive changed the way that we do, how we got here. And in my there be Better tools and in Better frameworks and in mental models for thinking about navigating change.

Early in twenty twenty one, you started grappling with this question. When you are listening to people talking about, covered and saying, well, let's hope that at some point we can get back to Normal, and you started thinking about the implications of that change, that let you to think about different models for navigating change. One of which was homestay is one of which was a time that you tapped into a you think is a Better model for understanding change, which is our states. Can you talk us through that because it's an important intellect al framework for an understanding that we actually have to think about change differently.

Yeah, that's right in in. Before I do that, I forgot. Another is huge, significant that I underway in the last decade. And that is throughout my childhood and early adult hood, and even into middle adulthood, I had always like very sound mental health.

And around the age of thirty, I suffered a very severe clinical depression that really came out of nowhere and made me quite sick for the Better part of a year. So that was another just huge disruption that I could have never, never imagined. And that within the same chapter proceeding, this book of all this change show IT really was the good, the bad, the ugly.

But everything just felt like I was constantly in flux and in constantly shifting. So wanted to throw that in because I think that's important. So homeostasis versus Alice, this is homeostasis.

My sense is that many, if not all, listeners of the podcast will have heard of this term. And IT traces itself all the way back to the early sixteen hundreds, so long before we had any sort of coin quote, science. And really, just to the beginnings of imperial m, meaning people in the community would observe something, and they'd observe IT again, and then they develop a theory around IT.

right? This is what's just starting to happen at this time period. And homes statues is a term that describes what people saw when those in the late sixteen hundreds get ill.

So both people would have a bad temperature around ninety eight point six. And then you get sick and you spoke a fever. So your body temperature races as an immune system.

Martial's a response. And this is long before we had antithetical or anti viral. So you ve got sick. You had a fever. And what would happened back then is some people would die and their body temperature return to Normal.

And other people over time, their body temperature will return to Normal to fight off the infection, and they may be healthy. So homeostatic describes change as the pattern of order or stability than disorder or instability, in this case of fever. And then IT says that a healthy system gets back to order is quickly as I can.

So it's order disorder back to order. And what started out truly to describe a fever over the last five hundred years, talk about snow creep. IT became the prevAiling mental model and framework for all change.

So not just for human biology, but for human psychology, not just on the individual level, but on the organization level. And now you can spend time in the internet and say, how do I change my financial habit? How do I change my health habit? How do I lose weight?

In at the first page of all those ico hit is going to be something about fighting against homeostasis, or fighting against the natural urge to stay the same or go back to order. So that had been the prevAiling model of how people think about change and baked into that model. Is that changes inherently bad, right? Because we want to move from disorder back to where we were.

And the goal then is to resist change, to avoid IT. Or when we're faced with change to immediately get back to stability. Now about twenty years ago, a cohort of cutting edge into disciplinary scientist, largely based out of the university of pennsylvania, they had a little bit of an epiphany, which is essentially homeless states.

Well, IT describes what happens when you have a fever. It's actually not a very good fit model for thinking about most other changes that we undergo. And they did this big analysis of both at the individual level, but then also at the organization level and even at the species level, how those they endure in weather chAllenges.

What's their path? What's the model if they follow? And what they found is they found this l static response.

They coin this term l states, which essentially says that when face with change, healthy living system moves from order to disorder to reorder. So it's true that we crave stability, but that stability is always somewhere new. We don't go back to where we were.

And I think the item logy of these words really ellet get me sums up the story. So homeostasis comes from the latter route, homo, which means same, and then status, which means standing. So he argues that we achieve stability by staying the same, right? That's the goal.

Stay the same, achieve stability. L stasis comes from the latter. Alo, which means change or variable. And then stasis, which against means standing. So Alice states, says that we achieve stability through change.

And that has this elegant double meaning, which is that one is possible to be stable through change in two. The way to be stable through change is through change is by changing, at least to some extent. And those two different models really become these mindsets that totally transform how you approach uncertainty, change and instability, right?

Because in one model, it's inherently a threat. In the goal is to get back to where you are. And in the other model, IT is just the first rule of thermo dynamics that things move towards chaos and enroll y, and that we're always existing in systems that are changing in the goal isn't to be stable by resisting change.

That's a fool's iron. The goal is to be stable through the process of change, through those cycles of order disorder. Reorder.

I think curiously, and you type into this in your book, this is something that spiritual traditions understood in a way that maybe science often didn't. Richard, who talked about going from order to disorder to reorder. I mean, I have a chapter in my book.

Richer was a happier titled everything changes. IT begins with the famous quote from shenyang suzuki that the auto of that mind begin as mind, who said that everything changes is the basic truth for each existence. No one can deny this truth, and all the teaching of butsu is convinced within IT.

And one of things that he then went on to say later in that book is a terrific book, is he said, if we cannot accept this teaching that everything changes, we cannot be in composure. And I was very struck when I was working on my book that this whole theme of change runs massively through investing. So you have someone like Howard T.

Saying, well, OK, so if everything is in constant flux, including the economy and markets and industries and companies and our own lives, then actually somehow I have to accommodate myself to the reality that things are changing. I can't just be denial. And so that actually really helped him to become a multibillion APP.

And likewise, bill Miller, who is the greatest mutual fun manager of his generation, said to me at one point twenty thousand years ago, the world changes. This is the biggest problem in markets. And so I think what's curious is that this whole theme of change, which seems kind of abstract, has actually run through spirituality for thousands of years and has also run through investing in business because it's just the incredibly shaky quick sand on which our lives and business and investments are constructed.

And so my sense is just we have to accommodate ourselves to this reality, whether we're trying to construct this as how IT Marks would say an anti frag life for an anti frag portfolio. Sorry, long, silly. But does that raise any thoughts from u. brad?

Oh, that does. So the first design, unsurprisingly, tend to agree with you. I think that in between disorder and reorder, there are often many opportunities. So if you're an investor, that could be an opportunity to beat the market, that could be an opportunity to be a little bit ahead of what's already Price in on the coming reorder. If you're an athlete that is undergoing an injury, that could be an opportunity to reshape your game or to make adjustments to come back a different player. If you are in a relationship, whether it's a business partnership or romantic partnership, a period of disorder can be a time for growth in the relationship.

If you can come back together, having learned from the chAllenge and then our personal lives when we're in the midst of disorder, even though I can feel extremely uncomfortable in, at times even modifying and painful, the research shows that when we get to the other side of these chAllenges, we tend to derive some in some growth from them. So I think that it's just whether we like IT or not, everything changes. As you said, like impermanent is just a basic rule of every ancient wisdom tradition, and IT is the first rule of physics.

So whether you look at IT from a scientific angle or spiritual angle, you come to the same place in in permanent works both ways. Sometimes it's a cause of real chAllenge in distress, and sometimes it's a cause of wonderful things. It's just the air that we breath.

The other thing that I would say that I think is really interesting, and this is a theme that is in my first book, the practice of groundless. So I come from a family of investors. I don't know if you know that about me.

I broke the old, and one often became an author and a coach. So my grandfather was a investor. My father's and investor. My cousin took over the practice and has been trying to get me, I guess, he stabbed about ten years ago trying to get me to work with him. So I grew up on finance.

And the concept of regression to the mean is always stuck with me in how, in an alathea system, you are going through these cycles of order disorder, reorder. And sometimes the entire curve shifts in ways that are very hard to predict. They are impossible to predict.

But generally, there's some signal in its all the variance is a system progresses and move towards change. And I think that's important to keep in mind. So at the same time that everything always changing, there is some kind of this stability and then there's these generated events that perhaps shift the entire curve. And I think navigating live well and navigating markets well probably depends on holding these competing ideas at the same time.

Yeah, I think that's one thing your very good at in your books, and that will come to later. If you have this ability to hold contradictory or conflicting ideas in some of dynamic tension, it's often, yes, and rather than either or so, we'll get to that later. But I guess this is one of the great themes of that chapter.

Everything changes when I was writing about how IT mox is that in some ways, you're in real trouble because the future is unknowable and everything is changing and yet we have to make decisions about the future. But the investors and parents where we're living or what job to take anything like that. And on the other hand is how I would point out, you can look at the cycles of the past and you can see that there are certain things that repeat, like patterns of human greed or over excitement, irrational exuberance.

There are things that repeat, and there are things that are totally new. And this is one of the things that makes investing unbelievably difficult and complex because it's hard to tell. Like is this really a new paradigm? Is is just the same old thing.

So anyway, wanted to ask you really in some depth about the various tools that we can use to navigate change, because you're so practical about analyzing how we can do this and giving us practical methods for doing this. But first, I wanted really to get you to define the idea, the concept that really at the heart of master of change, which is, this time, rugged red flexibility. Can you define what you mean about IT and explain why we need to be both rugged red and flex, but why we need these two opposing capabilities so that we can navigate this very uncertain changing world in a death and robust way.

So to be rugged ed is to be determined, durable, very robust nm, talia would say, anti fragile. And to be flexible is to be soft and supple and to bend easily without breaking. And on its face, these are two opposite terms, right? But in my reporting and research for this book, what I found is that those individuals that are able to withstand change and and grow from changed, they're not rugged or flexible.

They're rugged and flexible, so they would score very high on both of these traits. And then you zoom out and you look at the empirical change for which is by far of the greatest magnetite. And that's how you and I got here today, William.

It's evolution, the survival of the fittest and selection of species. Essentially, what happens on a scale of the planet is you have cycles of order where there's stability and then disorder. So there's climate change, there's a media, something happens to an apex predator, the whole ecosystem shifts into disorder, and then there's reorder, right? IT comes out different.

And you look at species that have survived over time for the longest durations. And what evolutionary biology find is that those species are rugged and flexible. Those are my terms. Evolutionary biologist would say they're highly complex.

But what this means is that there are parts of the species that are so central and core to what they are that if those parts changed, the species would no longer be recognizable. That would be a new species. But outside of those central features in those core parts, what I call the basis of rugby.

Ss, if you're not extremely flexible and everything else, then you're also gna get selected out. So if you have no rug inness and it's all flexibility, then there's really no center of gravity. There's no you there's no strength. But if you're so rugged red across the board that you can't be adaptable and you can't be flexible on anything else, then when there is a big changer, when something shift, you're going to a get selected out or an individual level, you're going to suffer from anxious and autism.

So i'm not interested in study evolution at the planetary scale, but I think there are personal evolution in our organizational evolution or the evolution of a family IT follows that same framework right of this orter disorder, reorder stability and stability, new stability. And the way to work through those cycles is to know what's core and what makes you who you really are is a person or if it's is an investor. Your principles is your philosophy, your philosophy of the market, and not to budge on those things, right? Those are your sources of rug inss.

Those are the hills to die on and then to be willing to be flexible and to adapt to change on everything else. So really getting really clear. And what are your core values? What are your guiding principles? And then what is merely have IT that you can be willing to change.

And this holds true at the level of how you navigate change in a certain domain of life. So as an athlete that's injured is somebody whose kids are moving out of the house, is someone that's approaching retirement. But and also all true is you think about your life as a whole and just how you age and how you grow over time.

This notion of rugged flexibility and really solved my personal problem of needing a new way to think about change. As I mentioned that the start of the book, and as I mentioned the start of this conversation, I personally struggle change. But i'm also a realist.

I pride myself and seeing things sometimes too clearly. And I saw IT like everything changes. But I didn't like the idea of not having a center of gravity in rugged flexibility.

For me, is a constructed solves that because IT gives you permission to be rugged and to define yourself by something and two, have a ground that you stand on well, at the same time asking yourself to practice massive flexibility around those core features. Let's take a quick brick. And here from today's answer.

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All right.

back to the show. I wants to talk in some depth with you about there is practical tools and practices and strategies to develop rugged flexibility in our daily life because this is gonna. Our listening is a great deal. Investors as family, people as people, constructing a career in our approach to our health, everything really. And so I want to go through in some detail.

There is tools that you've written about not only in this latest but but also actually in your previous broken on your podcast, you've talked about IT, and i'll include a lot of these sources and resources in the showed you mention core values a minute ago. Obviously, that's really an important aspect of this, figuring out what you really stand for in the beginning. So that's gonna guide. You can you talk a little bit about the importance of core values as a kind of north star to guide you through these chAllenges and changes and disruptions, and also then give us a sense of what actually is a smart process for establishing or clarifying .

what our values might be. More values are your guiding principles or the quality is to which you aspire. So these are the things that are most important to you. A few examples are health, creativity, compassion, strength, kindness, wisdom, intellect, rigor, integrity, spirituality, family, reason, someone and so forth. And a whole lot of psychology research shows that when you have about anywhere from two to five core values, and when you are cute, aware of what those are and also how to practice them, you tend to feel less stress when you are under threat or when there's chAllenges are changes. And you also tend to navigate change Better because you have essentially a compass, you have your core values to help guide you.

So that's the value of knowing your core values, is that when your face change, when he feels like everything around you is in flux and shifting in the ground that you're standing on the swept from under you, if you know your core values, you can ask yourself, what would the creative thing to do be here? What would someone who values integrity do? What would someone who values wisdom do in this situation? And then the core values become a rudder to help guide you through the unknown in terms of a process for deducing ones, or values.

This lies at the heart of something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which was really developed in first to help individuals through depression. But since there's been hundred even of thousands of studies showing that is a good model for human flourishing. And while being beyond the absence ence of and within acceptance and commitment therapy, that the basis is very simple, which is see clearly, accept what happening and then commit to acting and alignment with your core values.

Now simple doesn't mean easy in the practice of this is quite chAllenging. So the first step is to determine one's core values. In the book, I list a hundred example core values just to get folks started with brainstorming.

But the method that I find works best is to grew up like terms. So go through a list and maybe you have twenty terms. Again, you want to get done to three to five, even two to five. And then you take those two terms, and you start to put them in groups based on similarities, ties.

And what most people find is you got somewhere between two to six groups that are pointing at a somewhat condense theme, and then you want to find the right word that represents that theme, and then you want to define IT in real kind and create terms. Because core values, they shouldn't just be something is on a poster at your office or it's on a little sticky note on your mirror. They should have some teeth.

You should be able to practice them. In that way, they become a basis for stability in your day to day life. All the time in particularly when things are changing, you can look back to your core values to help guide you into the unknown.

I think a story of this that really brings this to life is that of the tennis star, Roger fetter, who's known obviously for his greatness in tennis, really for his Greenest and sport, but also for his longevity. So fetter played well into his late thirties, even early forties, in a sport where prior to him, most people would peak and retire before they hit thirty two. In russia, fetters.

He came before the brand, James before time, brady before Serena Williams. He was really the first power sport athlete to redefine aging and longevity. Sport will lot of people don't know about rugger feather is that between the ages of thirty three and thirty six, he didn't win a single tournament, not a single tournament.

So you look back articles written about fetter during that time period in everyone in the tennis community, all the critics, they said that the change that comes for every tennis player agent finally caught up to Roger and IT was time to retire. And just the fact that he made IT to thirty three being world class, right, like thirty three year dinosaur in that sport. So what if I do do for the first year and a half of his lumm p, he essentially followed a homeostasis model to change.

He tried to get back to where he was. So he just kept beating his head against the wall and said, i'm the greatest player of all time. I still want to keep playing time as I think I can.

What happened? He repeatedly got injured and under performed. And then about a year and half into this journey of under performance and injury, he had this epiphany that essentially said he's not the same player he was.

He has aged in federal steps back and does something that is so hard for an athlete to do. And he separates what his core values are, which, for him, in this context, competition mastery in the love of the game of tennis, from what's habit. And for him, what habit was, was a Wilson racket playing at the baseline, a two handed backhand training seven days a week.

So fetor says, I want to hold to mate core values. Those are my sources of rugged. Ss, I want to keep playing tennis, I want to keep competing, and I want to keep moving down the path of mastery.

In order to do that, he realized he has to be flexible on everything else. So he completely reinvented game. He learns a one handed back hand to take speed off the ball.

He starts playing at the net, which has the effect of shortening points, so he does not have to run back and forth on the baseline against the unger kids. He completely overhauls his training schedule to allow more time for rest and recovery. And then he even changes his racket, right? So he had used the same racket since he's fifteen, made him the greatest tennis player ever at the time.

And he adopts a new racket that has brand new technology that all the Younger kids are using. And in the result of this is eight thirty seven. He has the best winning percentage this career.

He is two major championships. He recalled ims, a top three ranking in the world. And then he continues to play well until he hit forty. So to me that this beautiful example of knowing your core values, your sources of rug inss the hills you're going na die on, using them to help determine your next moves during change, but then being very flexible on everything else.

And when I was reading the book, I looked at tape of federal playing when he was twenty six, and then again, when he was thirty eight. And on the one hand, he's the same Roger fetter, and on the other hand, he's completely different. And I think that that's what rugged lexi book is all about over time.

You are the same, William is you are twenty years ago, but you're also very different. And that gets the kind of the intellect al question at the heart of the book in those wisdom traditions, is what does that mean to have a sense of self when our very sense of selves are always changing? And I think IT can make a rational western brain explode. But the answer is both. And i'm both the same, and i'm different in federal, is someone to use those core values that source of rugged ss to navigating unknown into ultimately lead himself to a recorder that worked in service of .

his core values. And one of the practices or tricks that you talk about in the conclusion of the master of change is actually developing a fluid sense of self. It's clearly related to what you are just talking about with federal.

Can you expand a little bit on that? And I know that I had a lot also to do with what happened to you when you had an injury and had to stop playing a spot that heard of huge part of your identity. Can you give us a sense of why having a fluid sense of self. A, what IT is, and b, why IT would actually be helpful in enabling us to adapt, to change.

A fluid sense of self essentially asks you to view your identity. Not is something that is completely static, but that is something that is completely a more face, either rather to create identity around your values and define those values at a fairly broad level, and then you willing to shift within that structure. So that's very conceptual.

For example, I, for a long time, he defined myself as a runner that was a central part of my identity. Then I had this injury and I could no longer run, and I had orthopedic surgery. I mean, I I went to while homing for this special treatment.

After the Normal treatment fail, I give you my all in IT didn't work. What i've learned is that my value isn't actually running. What I liked about running was having objective goals that I could chase in community.

And I also like using my body in chAllenging myself. But that's not running, that's mastery, that's community, and that's being an athlete. And if I could define my identity is someone that values mastery and athleticism and community, then losing running is not a loss of identity. It's a shift in how I express that part of my identity. But IT doesn't feel like a loss of who I am.

So when I see people, and I hear people identify very closely with a specific activity, I urge them to think about, is that really the activity that is quarter of who you are? Is that something that is maybe a layer to deeper? This very much leads to a framework in the book that was first developed by the humanist philosophy.

Eric, from having versus being and having is when you define yourself by what you have. So I have this skill set, I have this income, I have this hosts, I have this child, I have this relationship. And what from points out is that, well, everything that you have is gonna change, and at some point that will probably be taken away.

So if you define yourself like what you have, it's a very precarious waited construct and identity, whether if you define yourself by who you are or what he called your being orientation, when I call your core values, no one can take those away from you. And a common question that I get listeners might have as well, what if your core values change is totally Normal, but even then, it's your old core values that lead you to your new ones and your sense of self in your sense of identity? IT becomes more fluid and almost becomes like this evolving process to, over time versus thing.

They are always trying to protect the hold on to another framework in the book that so many professionals, in particular, have found really helpful around identity is this notion of diversifying your sense of self. So in investing, my limited understanding is that it's a pretty foundational role, is that barring very interesting circumstances, you generally want to diversify portfolio to at least some. And the reason for that is if all your asset turn one class in something unforeseen, e happens to that asset class.

You're as so well, you're you're in for IT. You're in big trouble yet where their identities so often we throw our entire sense of self til an asset class. And that can be the investor, the parents, the athletes, the leader of a company. And if there's a change in the area of our life, especially with the negative one, I can feel like an attack on our entire sense of self. And if that's the only way that we define ourself, then weren't for trouble, right? So much like we diversify our investment holdings, I arguing the book at get to diversify your sense of identity a little bit to have multiple sources of meaning in one's life, so that if you take a hit in one area of your identity, you can lean on the others for strain.

Yeah, this is such an important idea. And I I mean, to give you a couple of very listeners, a couple of very real world examples in the apple logue of my book, I write about this great investor, Jason cop, who had been this unbelievably successful hedge from guy side, like working Steve, and had just like ridiculously good results, and then ended up running his own heart und had the fastest ever start up of any heat on.

And then things started to go badly. And I remember interviewing him at the time, and he said to me, I didn't really know what to do when they started to go wrong, because i'd never failed at anything. And his whole identity suddenly was in turmoil.

And what's kind of amazing about Jason, who i've interviewed on the podcast, is he managed to reorient his whole life and reinvent himself in a kind of away. But I seen that kind of disintegration also, actually, in my own life. I was editing the european middle of in afra editions of time gaine, and then got laid off in the middle of financial crisis.

And suddenly you're like, way to second and i've been working seventy, eighty hours a week, this thing i'm really good at and now it's gone. And instead of getting into president and prime ministers, you're like will actually, so what am I now? And so having actually to be like wild, a father, a husband and a write and all these, it's really hot that kind of dissolution of the ground on which you stand. So I think this idea of actually finding a having, as you put in a fluid itself, but be diversifying where you're onna get your meaning from is really important.

A metaphor that I like to use is to think of identity like a house. So if you have a house in the only has one room in IT, in that one room touches fire, floods, your screwed. It's gonna very just combining. You're going to have to move out of the house altogether, whether if you have a house and that has multiple rooms in IT, in one room catches fire of floods, you can go into the other room to seek refuge while you figure out the fire flood.

And if we think about our identities the same way we can have multiple rooms in our identity house, there can be the investor room, the spouse room, the parent room, the community member room, the athlete room, the booklover room, the travel room. Infinite options. It's just so important that we have more than one room because it's some point or another all the rooms are going to experience turmoil.

But adds, are there not all to experience turmoil at the same time? So then you get to seek refuge in these other places within your identity house. In a couple of things to be really explicit about. I don't argue you for baLance. I'm not saying with the room should be the same size. I'm not saying that you should spend the same amount of time in every room actually think that it's very good to prioritize and to say these are the rooms that for this season of life, I wanted be all in on and spend uh, disproportionate share in those rooms. I just don't think that you should let any rooms that are quarter who you are get moldy because you never know when you're going to need them.

The second thing that I would say about this metaphor is that, and I eluted to this when i've interviewed people that are towards the end of their careers are that have retired and that have done really well and also have been highly fulfilled and satisfied with none, only their career, with their life, and they've done in the right way. So they're not athlete sit of dogs. They haven't engaged in fraud.

They really have good integrity on their path to success. What I find is that if you zoom in, in any one junction of their life, they look very, very unbaLanced. But if you zoom out and look across their whole life, they look quite baLanced.

So they have different seasons for different emphasis in their life. And what they're good at is they just never let the important rooms get. So maybe there's a season where you're going all in on your career, but that marriage room is still really important. You can't let IT get moldy. Doesn't mean that you have to emphasize that all the time, but you've gotta figure out what's the minimum effective dose to maintain that room so that when the season of my life shifts, it's still there for me. I haven't let IT go to crap, so I just can't emphasize enough how important to define the rooms in your identity house to be really clear about what ones you're emphasizing and why and just to make sure that you never completely ignore any other important ones.

I think there's such an important idea cause I look at so many of the great investors who ended up divorced or with kids who don't talk to them, and I don't know, is talking to a friend of mine the other day who's in a very high power, very intense job and he's just let us health just fall apart because he doesn't want to neglect his kids, he doesn't a neglectest spouse and he's got unbelievable responsibility and deadlines at work.

So just reacted body, so yeah, this idea really resonates for me pretty deeply. I wanted to move us to another really important tool, or practice, or in this case of mindset, which you describes a crucial life skill, which is the mindset of tragic optimism. Can you talk about this idea that originally comes to A A Victor Frankl in this famous essay of is the case for tragic optimism because I think it's very distinctive of also to your way of viewing life in the universe.

I'm so glad you asked for. Inkle is most known for his book man search for meaning, which he wrote most of IT he composed in in his mind. Well, he was in a concentration, came during the holidays, and then he survives the holy cost.

So many of his family members and friends are murdered by the notes. And he comes out and he publishes this work called man search for meeting. The first half of witches is member, or i'd say, or close to memory. And then the second half, he really develops what becomes existential psychotherapy.

So it's this ground breaking work in any psychology majoring in university has read this book, but then he puts out this much less or known essay later on, called the case for tragic optimism in in IT, Frankl argues that to be a human is to live a very tragic life. And he says that there's no way around. This is inevitable.

Even the greatest human life has tragedy. And he defines three tragedies that everyone faces. The first is physical pain, because we're made a flashing bone, nobody gets out of life without experiencing physical pain.

The second is heartbreaking disappointment. That is because we have these big prefrontal courtesy in our brains that allow us to make all these wonderful plans, and sometimes the plans don't work out or frustrated. And then the third tragedy is that, as far as we know, we're the only species that clearly aware of our own mortality, so that we are going to die.

And in everyone we love is gonna die. And Frankl says there's no reason to barrier ahead in the sand or to deny this. We have to accept these are the tragedies inherent to be human being.

And yet and yet, the work of a mature adult is to understand these tragedies, to maintain optimism and hope, not in spite of those tragedies, but almost because of them, because we know that life is gonna full of tragedy. We have a responsibility to ourselves to maintain optimism and hope, and to find joy to and IT doesn't have to be this or that doesn't have to be happy or sad, tragedy or optimism. IT can be tragic optimism.

We can accept the suffering in ourselves, in in the world, well, the same time maintaining hope for ourselves and hope for the world. And I just think that the Franko first wrote about this in the nineteen seventies. IT could not be more pressure in, more timely.

Now I see IT all of the time you log on to any part of the internet. And it's not long before you have these two extremes. One extreme, i'm going to call the toxic positivity or the pale an extreme, which is, everything's great.

Don't bother me. You know, I figured that out. I don't want to hear about your problems. Life is good.

what? How are you possibly complaining? There's never been a Better time to be a human. And the other extreme is what i'm going to call the nyalong m or despite extreme, which is that everything is broken. Societies on raveling.

All these systems and structures are so backwards that what can be little individual do, then you just fAllen to despair animalism on its face. These are polar episodes, but when you think about IT, they actually have one thing in common, which is in a way that is kind of easy to adapt, is mindsets, because they absolve you of needing to do anything. So if everything is great, always, and you don't want to hear about any of the worlds problems, well then there's nothing to work on.

There's nothing to make Better. If everything is so terrible and so broken and so structurally broken, but anything you do is pointless, more than why would you act so both toxic positivity in nal ism or despair, they absolve you of any responsibility to take action in what Frankl would saying. What I argue is that IT is our job in the very seductive these extremes, but is our job not to fall into one of those extremes, to hold their ground in the middle and really embrace tragic optimism, to realize that there is a is broken about the world, and there is elected needs improvement, and there is elect that fears so overwhelming.

And if we can maintain hope, we do have some agency to make our lives Better and to make the world Better. And so often you see extremes. You know, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is all personal responsibility.

This is everything structural. And all that matters is what zip kody born to in any reasonable person will tell you. It's both of those things matter.

Both accountability and personal respons ibt. And individual behavior is very important and what zip code you're born into is very important. And I just think that there's such a lack of nuance in extreme in, especially in the internet. But really, it's pervaded so much of the discourse in the western world where IT feels like you have to choose into these extremes when reality is messy in somewhere in the medal. And I think tragic optimism is just such a wonderful concept for embracing that messiness and for being a realist without falling into despair.

There's a beautiful line that you quote in the master of change that's from an interview that Bruce springsteen did. IT was seventy one with the atlantic, where he talked about the heart of wisdom amounting to learning. Quote, to accept the world on its terms without giving up the belief that you can change the world.

That's a successful adult hood, the medication of your thought process, and very soul to the point where you understand the limits of life without giving up on its possibilities. It's a wonderful insight. I remember actually years ago when I was living in london going to see springsteen in a concert, webby stadium.

I came on so many times part, and the highlight for me was, I guess that was the wrecking ball tour. And there was this moment where you see this aging guy with this broken body. Sy s the shot.

Just sense of this guy who accepted the fact that he was really had allows a child that his body was breaking down, that his voice was braking down, that he was in pain. But there was something kind of triumphant and exhaust ant about the fact that he just kept coming back amid the pain. So I kind of embodies that spirit, actually, of tragic optimism.

Oh, one hundred percent. Another way to think about IT in simple terms is like you can't fix a broken world if you become a broken person. And to resign yourself to a broken world, in my opinion, is just one is not very helpful until IT doesn't make for a great existence.

And if you like that spiral IT can very quickly become depression. So I think that tragic optimism is, again, it's a way to live in between these extremes into accept reality without sparing another thing. And Bruce rinky, in that really interesting is so there's a new singer, song writer and really kind of has become a pop star.

His name is that brian. I think he's only twenty five and a half, maybe twenty six years old, and I think he's music very touchy, but it's not great like I don't know and maybe I am dating myself. He's just kind of years and live that much whatever.

But he's selling out arenas, millions of downloads and spotify and IT be very easy to see someone like Bruce brinks stein be a carmaker in say, I don't know about this guy, but Bruce rinks stine just did a collaboration with him in age held springsteen, seventy three, seventy four maybe. And I think like that also embodies this kind of tragic optimism where you could sit there and complain about how the music industry, how everything's gone to streaming and how you have to look a certain way and be good on tiktok to be popular. Exact brand that started by posting all one minute videos of him playing and IT be so easy to find to, just like being grump y in shutting that.

But instead sprinklin goes and does a club with him. And I think, like, that's really cool. And i'm much Younger than seventy four, and I I looked to that and I hope that when i'm seventy four, I have that kind of open heart and open mind that brislington in.

Has bill walton recently passed away? What an example of someone that lived with tragic optimism. So these examples are out there, and they tend to be people that we all admire. Yeah, it's very hard to go through life with that sort of titus.

Another practice that you talk about, that very important that I want to break down a little bit, is you talk about why so helpful to lean on routines and situations to provide stability during times of disorder. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of routines when we're dealing with chaos?

I write in my book there's a chapter on habits of high performance in one of things is very distinctive about the most successful investors is they're obsessed with their habits, their routines. There's a point in the book where I quote a friend of mine, can subnet in, who was a very successful investor, who then became a neurologist, and he talks about how basically the four habits he keeps coming back to in times of chaos based exercise, Sally, good nutrition and meditation. Because is like, those are the four that we know a great for cognitive tive health and cognitive tive function.

You ve thought very deeply about this whole area of routines and rituals. Talk us through this how we should think about routines, what are the best routines that we should start to adopt? And also your philosophy of being quite dismissive of the movement to optimization, which we are seeing with everyone from human Peter and you're going be too polite to name name. So i'm naming them for you.

All right? This is a loaded question in a good question. So first off, I love your friends for categories.

The only one that I would consider adding in my guess here, he would agree with me, is the importance of community in making gathering with people matter to whether it's your family and colleagues, friends, uh, cornerstone of your routines. All right. So square one.

Why are routines important? Little bit of neuroscience. Our brains are predictive. They are always trying to predict what's gna happen next.

And for very good reason, there is so much stimulus in the world, our brains couldn't think a stepper to ahead. We would never make our way through the day. Mean, imagine if we're having this conversation and i'm predicting that you're going to listen and then respond.

But if my brain couldn't do that, if my brain wasn't sure, if you were going to hang up the call, if there was going to be an asteroid ID through the window, if you are going to save, if the interviews going terror like IT would never work. So even when we don't realize that our brains are making predictions about what's gonna en next, in in times of change, in uncertainty, in chaos, IT becomes very hard to predict what's gna happen next. What a routine allows us to do is allows us to carve out this one or two or three areas of our life, however many components we have ever routing where we can make a prediction.

I'm going to go for a run in the morning. I'm going to make my afternoon coffee IT too. I'm going to sit down in pray or meditate or read or journal in the evening that has a very high likelihood of coming true.

And that is so satisfying for our brain is a neurochemical level to make a prediction into habit come true. It's a part of our life that we have some control over. So that is the number one important value of a routine.

Now what that means is what the routines are don't matter as much as the fact that we have them, right? For you, IT might be listening to A C, D, C. For me, IT might be meditating to the heart of the book is, teaching doesn't matter.

As long as you have that thing and you do IT at the same time, and your brain starts to associate that thing with a sense of control and predictability in your life, then it's good. IT works. There are a few cavy ATS.

And i'm going to go very closely to what your friend that became the neology c. Said, we do know, based on decades of science, said there are a few somewhat universal elements that can become routines that are helpful for just about everybody, that a try that applies them, and first and foremost, exercise. Physical activity is the number one modify behavior for both physical health, mental health and cognitive health.

Number two would be community, some sort of social life, social gathering. That's rita zed. Again, that can be a family dinner, that can be going to church or synagogue, can be getting together with friends to play poker once a month.

Doesn't matter what IT is, but something that you can look forward to that happens on a regular innovation that involves other people. Our species evolved in tribes, were very social species. That's what allowed us to survive.

Predators like lions is that bunch of humans are smarter than one lion, or a tribe of lions, or a pack of lions, I should say. So it's very much in our hardwiring during times of chAllenge to gravitate towards community. Sleep is really important.

However, there's a lot of nonsense out there about sleep. So if you take these supplements, if you track your heartful variability, there's some guy out there that it's not tracking the strength of his erection during his sleep is a sign of his health. His name's bryan Johnson.

Am happy naming his name because I think he's out of like insane a lot of people like him. And you can disagree. However, the research shows that the more that we worried about sleep, the harder IT is to sleep.

So if you turn sleep into something to excel at, then what is supposed to be the most wasteful restored of part of your day? Sleeping now becomes something to win that, or a metri C2Chase. Well, of course, it's gonna harder to sleep.

So I think that sleep is the bio product of a regular physical activity throughout your day of making sure that you're not lonely because we know that people who feel lonely, they don't sleep all. And then I would add, nutrition is really important, but there there's all these different diets, and it's really just about avoiding highly process fields. I wana loop back because I knew you have a very happy intellectual audience.

People might say, like, what's bread? Talking about social isolation and sleep, right? I didn't say, like, you need to take your magnesium sleep Better. I said, if you're feeling lonely, that could be driving poor sleep.

And the reason for this is fascinating because, again, we evolved in tribes so early, early on our species history, right when we're turning from these Harry primates that look closer to a gilla era, to what we now view as a human. If you are alone, you can never fall asleep, because you can be picked off by a mount minor, by a predator, right? literally.

If you lost the tribe and fell L E sleep on the savana your dad, you wouldn't survive long enough to pass on your DNA. But if you were in a tribe and you had strengthened numbers, well, then you could rest and you could sleep because you knew that you are alone and isolated. And that still Carries forth to today, the number one reason that social isolation is so detrimental to our health is because IT raises our blood pressure and causes poor sleep.

Isn't that fascinating? But IT makes total sense because if you're alone, you're anxious and you always are on guard, you're always on the look out so you don't sleep well. So for me, the big to our movement in community, and then I would put nutrition and yeah, I think a lot of the other stuff are on routine, is very highly individualized.

And I think anyone that tells you that there's this one supplement or this one breathing exercises, or this one way to do something, to have a routine that helps performance, I almost bet my bottom dollar with there's selling that one thing. Let's take a quick brick. And here from today's sponsors, have you ever been interested in mining bitcoin?

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All right.

back to the show. I wrote a length in my book about simplicity and the simplice, really the sophistication that goes when you you understand the topic. So simplify and distill IT down to its essence. I actually, I I had done a lot of work as a ghost writer and editor on a book about langevin in the light, which had been a number one by sellar a few years ago. Not that i'm a paragua of good, healthy are anything, but i've done a lot of reporting on this.

And one of things that really deeply resonated for me that I quoted in a footnote of my book was something, where did owner h, the father of lifestyle medical was talking to me about what he figured out from forty years of research into everything that work to reverse hot disease and diabetes is, are all of these things and he said, really, I can sum IT up in eight twins and he said, eat well, move more, stress less, love more and really, if you, yeah, it's an amazing sentence. If you want, pack each of those things, really eat well as more about, you know having more Green stuff, more vegetables and the like, move more as you say, you know, in a lot of you're writing, you talk about just moving thirty to forty five minutes a day. And any way that you will do consistently doesn't really matter, that stress less so, anything from breathing techniques to meditation and love more, which is the importance of community.

And so I just thought that was a beautiful example of the reduction of this incredibly complex subject to something that was essential and true. You've written a lot on your website, on your blog and talked about on your podcast about the bizarre things that people do to kind of sellers on great complexity. And it's complicated because our audience, these are high performance. We want to perform level.

But you point out you know, that all of these things like, you know, joko willing humans, so the saying we should do this factory reset by having the hot and doing IT again, a gano in a human man talking about getting lots of morning sunlight, selling ag one and measuring our vo 2 max， as Peter ratio would talk about, or wearing the ora ring or the woop strap or a continuous gas monitor or light blocking glasses or whatever, it's interesting and it's salable. And I think if you're an incredible top performer, maybe some of this stuff is able. But I think so, I think I thought a lot of things I was reporting, and I don't use any of them anymore.

The only thing I think I continued to use, what was this really weird gadget that you strap on to your ARM? What is that called? It's called Apollo neo vibrates. And IT was developed, I think, a university of pittsburgh for people with post traumatic stress disorder. And for some reason I find an unbelievably using.

And when I lost IT for several months or I didn't work for several months, I remember finding again and putting in on and just, I almost like, burst out crying. And I was so happy that I had IT back on. I was like an old friend.

So all of those things that I used, you know, I have masses of eighty one sitting in my fridge, untouched. I don't know, my orring sitting beside the bad. I don't mean sell anyone, but I think this gets something really important. Do you have any thoughts about what I just said?

I do. So it's funny timing. I just had an ipad published in the new york k times, the sunday's times on this very topic.

And i'm in a quote from IT, I say that over the last decade i've studied excEllence and i've work with some of the world's best performers in the process. This is true. I worked with arman world champion N, B, A, dynasty teams, really the best of the best when IT comes to performance.

And what makes a professional athlete or n olympian great. It's not waking up at five. I am to call, plan, engage at the sun. I mean, none of them do IT i've never worked with a lead performer is worried about a morning called plunge and low angle sunlight, not one.

But what they all have in common is a relentless focus on the fundamentals of their craft, executing those fundamentals with ruthless consistency for years, adapting the right mindsets and surrounding themselves with the right people, and then having the right genetics is also really important. And that's IT. So I think that actually, when you look at the tip top, no one is engaging in any of these kind of cocoa, my health things, because they don't have the time to do.

They're focused on nAiling the fundamentals. And I think what happens is I had a conversation about this with Morgan household. I'm sure your audience knows of theology, of money in same. And I talk to my cousin who am very close with, I mentioned, and very successful financial advisory practice.

And I think that the trapped investors face is you don't have time to sit around and evaluate these claims and you want to be on the cutting edge, you want to be a peak performer. But what I say to them is, is no different than all the coconino, an investment advice that goes around and this self comes in cycles. And right now, or in a health and longevity cycle, fifteen years from now, we might be back in a crypto currency panzi scheme.

Here's ten ways is to beat the market in ten days. If you buy my online course schedule. And because you have domain expertise, you can look at that and you can say, no, no, no. The way to become a great investor into a mass wealth is, I don't know, because i'm not a great investor, but presumably there's a set of fundamental principles that are rather boring and you have to adhere to them for a very long time.

Yeah, for example, value a business and bye much less than its worth, you know, joe Green, but has said to me that the essence of polling move .

your badly everyday, love more and avoid alter process foods that's IT. But people don't want to hear that because IT seems too simple. And I think that it's important to also note in this health along g drivable space, and i've never met injured .

human in person. I've never .

met Peter d. There is a kernel of truth to all of that, like getting outside early in the day in getting natural light is undoubtedly helpful for one circadian rythm. No one would argue that, however, the notion of low angle morning sunshine IT has to be a certain angle and that has to be within minutes of you're waking up.

That's extrapolated from five studies that looked at in mice. Kay, there's no evidence that IT makes a difference, especially if you're stressing about IT and you're waking up earlier than you would in for fitting sleep if you're fitting exercise. Peter tea in vio two max, vio two max. It's great to have a good vio two max, of course, but how do you get a good vio ti max? There's no special program and you just move your body more, you exercise.

So I think that what a lot of these communicators have done is this latched on to these kind of complex, scientific sounding terms that are proxies for very boring behaviors, and then people get very caught up in the science that sounds sexy in the brain, shining y objects in the new device. But at the end of the day, for health, against regular exercise, avoid order process foods, the combination of these two things, order result in a body way that is not obese. Were talking about here having community, not using tobacco products.

And then if you're going to drink, do so in moderation. And if you can't drink in moderation and abstaining all together, that IT like there's nothing else really matters. Now, if you want to be a great performer in a physical attribute, and then you have to pick your sport, and you have to train for that sport, no different than how you develop map or domain expertise and anything.

When the last thing i'll say to look back to something he said earlier, I couldn't agree more. The way that I like to think about mastery is you go from simple to complex back to simple. So when your brand new do something, everything simple, how do you dead lift six hundred pounds when you take off his weight and you lift the bar up off the ground, and then you get into complexity, the switch gravers S S over hand up, the pushing into the ground versus pulling the sumer versus conventional.

There's pauses that this that you can do in your training. You need bigger, closer, do you need stronger hit lexus and on and on and on. And you can spend six years just reading about moving a bar from the grounds to your hips.

And then after the six years, how do you dad left? You just pick the bar up. So IT goes from simple to complex back. simple?

Yeah, it's very profound. This idea, I write a lot about IT in that chapter on simplicity and coke. Josh weight skin, who's also a master of this idea, taking IT, talks about the mystery of very simple techniques that usually not something very complex that accounts for success.

It's the mastery of a very simple technique. So another thing just to change subject that's very important in terms of building this kind of rugged flexibility so that we can handle change and disorder well, is controlling our reaction to things. Because, as we know from stoke pho sophy, we can't control what happens to, as always, we can control how we respond.

One of things that you talk about, this very practical technique and muster change, is what you call the four p technique. Can you explain how you use this technique in a way to become less reactive? So that were not controlled. What happens? Because this really affects us as investors when the markets getting hit and we are likely to do something stupid or when we're getting over excited or when we're in a fight with our ID or so, whatever IT is, I often think that these kind of these hinge moments, day or a week or our life, really kind of define whether we're gonna be OK or not, how we handle these moments .

that could go either way. So we are programmed as a species, is our genetic insurance to be very reactionary. And the reason for that is, for over ninety nine percent of humankind, we didn't live in a modern world of computers and email, wouldn't even live in civilized society, right?

We lived on the savana, and there were snakes at our feet, and there were lions over the horizon. If you see a sneaker, a lion, you do not want to be very thoughtful. You don't want to deliberately respond.

You want to react right? You want to get out a dads. I live in north CarOlina.

There's tons of snakes and bars, so I see big snakes embarrass at least once a week when i'm about hiking, even though i've seen them now a hundred times. My blood pressure goes up and there's no thinking involved that I just jolt. And that's good.

We're programmed to jolt because our survival depends on IT in circumstances when we're dealing with snakes embarrass, but when we're dealing with a stock market or a crying six year old or a teenager or a spouse, generally speaking, join doesn't make sense what ends up happening. We snap on someone or we make a poor decision, and then we regret IT later. So how do you shift from a reactive mode? And how do you overcome millennia of evolution? The prime does to react and get into a more responsive mode where there's more space, more thoughtfulness, you can be more deliberate.

Many philosophers have said that our humanity lies in the space between stimulus and action. So something happens in what we do about IT. The space between that, that's where our humanity lies.

That's where our wisdom, our ability to make decisions, lies for peace. Burst, pause and just do nothing. Take a couple deep breath. Name the sensations that you're experiencing. Psychologists call this affect labelling.

I'm feeling angry and feeling frustrated and feeling overwhelmed and feeling restless, feeling tightness in my brow and feel ing my fish clench. I'm feeling heat in my chest. I'm feeling a pit in my stomach and feeling butterflies and feeling excited.

Naming the emotion named the actual of physical sensation. What this does is, by naming IT, you no longer are IT. So you put some space between yourself in the situation or yourself in the emotions that you're experiencing, and already you've defuse that reaction.

Then you want to process what's actually happening here, what's going on? What does that mean for me? What pattern recognition can I draw? What would happen if I wait until tomorrow to do something about this? What would happen if I do what my first instinct is? How might that play out? A week from now, a month from now? How would I feel about that? Only then do you make a plan and say, giving my resources, my capabilities, my skills, my patterns, giving my values, here's how I think I want to move forward.

And then you execute on that plan and you proceed. So you pause, you process, you plan, and then you proceed. And what that does IT create space, right? Because the opposite is you panic and you pungle ahad.

Yeah, this people want to learn more about this. I would definite recommend they go back and listen to my sites with Daniela of emotional intelligence, who also thought a great deal about how to respond in these moments. And obviously, meditation is huge in expanding that space between stimulus response. IT puts things in slow motion a little day.

And if I may, jack quick, because I think that I share this with Daniel. The goal isn't not to feel the reactionary sensations. The goal is just not to act on them. I think it's very hard without taking massive amounts of sensitives to overcome the evolutionary hardwiring, to feel reactivity.

I think if you judged yourself for feeling that where you're always gna be judged yourself, what matters is that you don't act on IT so you can feel that reactivity and sit with you and let IT calm down and then move forward. And I think this is seems somewhat small, but it's very important because often a lot of people say I keep feeling reactionary and must be doing something wrong and not meditating ough. Why am I so high stressed? And because when you're constantly and stressful situations in its okay to feel a stress response.

Actually, if the stress response is shut down, then i'm worried that's like chronic fatigue or a chronic stressed that you want to feel that initial gel t and then you don't act on IT and you wanted to come down really fast. So it's not about getting red of that initial jolt. It's about not immediately letting IT take over and tell you what to do.

Is you mentioned the start of our conversation, you would totally blinded ded a few years ago. I think this is back in two thousand and seventeen, by appeared an obsessive compulsive disorder. And you wrote in the book IT was a chaotic bottom, the spiral of pain and tera, really, for about eight months. And I wonder if you could talk a little about what you learn from that experience that also really important in terms of developing ability to deal with adversity. Because you write in the book about self compassion recently on can you use that experience to talk about some of these other tools for building resilience, really, in times where everything kind of goes to hell?

sure. So the first thing is to recognize, when you're in one of those times, i'm sure i'm gna miss some examples. But the big ones that come to mind are severe physical illness, severe mental illness in grief.

Those are the big three. And when you're experiencing something like that, the worst thing that you can do is try to immediately grow or find meaning in the experience, like the other ninety nine percent of the time. Practice gratitude, write down what you're grateful for, you have a growth mindsets, be really greedy, all those things.

But the worst thing to do to someone that is in acute pain, be at physical, mental, or who is just lost a partner, a child, is to go to that person and say, well, what are three things are grateful for? That would be the most tone, death possible thing in why? Because then you judge yourself, because you start to say, what I don't feel grateful for anything.

So now, not only am I going through grief or depression or chronic pain, but I can't even do with all these will help people tell me to do, I can't feel grateful for something really must be broken and wrong when the reality is no IT socks to go through grief into h have that kind of physical or psychological distress. And there are periods of life when things aren't meaningful. I mean, there is a very little meaning to losing a child.

That's an extreme example, but sometimes things just suck. And I think to be able to say that and to be able to name that, even if you're an an uber optimistic growth oriented person in all the other times of your life, there might be times of your life when things just suck in that. okay. And the smartest thing to do, the real growth is just letting things suck. There doesn't have to be any meaning associated with IT.

Sometimes things just now it's fascinating is the research shows that often not all the time, but often you get to the other side of these experiences in one years later, five years later, a decade later, you look back on them and maybe you've grown and maybe you've derived ve some meaning from them, but when you're in the thick of the chAllenge and the thick of the pain, just letting showing up in surviving be enough, look at IT. So sometimes things can just suck, and that's okay. What tools can help? Nothing is more important than community and leaning others for support.

Study after study of resilience shows that is much less an inside game and much more outside game. It's about being able to ask for help, to lean on community for support, and then to take that help, to receive IT voluntary simplicity, something that you ve thought a lot about when things in life feel chaotic and out of control, simplify, were ever possible, right? If showing up and getting through is going to be a real chAllenge, make showing up and getting through as easy as you can.

So instead of looking to add solutions, look to subtract things that are causing you additional distress. Surrender is really important. There are times when problem solving in fixing really work in our favor, but there are also times when problem solving in fixing and get in the way, because we are not in a position to fix something or to solve the problem.

And it's so hard for driving type a people that have been hyper successful to eventually, at some point, let go and realize, I can fix this. Maybe this thing is unfixed ble. And it's only when we surrounded, and when we do that, that we start to give ourselves a chance to get a little bit Better because we stop getting in our own way.

I wanted to ask you one last thing, which is you have two kids, right? You have, I think, a six or seven year old. C, O, I know one year old, I think.

Lia, excEllent tally, named after a robot persic novel. When you think about all of the change and uncertainly and disorder their liable to face his adults, it's climate change or political extremism. M, or artificial intelligence, all the things. A, how out of us what are you trying to model to prepare them? I mean, what can we do when we're trying actually the model kind quality that our kids, the people around us are going to need in order to deal with really what we know is going to be probably accelerating disorder and change, rather than a return to some more peaceful era dream of.

I hope, to model, focusing on what we can control and trying not to waste energy worrying about what we can't. Tragic optimism and not being blind to all the tragedy, but also not letting all that tragedy turn to despair nyalong m and then self compassion and self discipline in an appropriate level.

Right now, for my seven year old, I think that's the most practical, which is you can do really hard things, and you should try to do really hard things, and you need to be kind to yourself, because the only way it's going to be sustainable keep showing up in doing hard things as if you don't beat yourself up when you fail. He had earlier this year his first strike out in little league baseball because he used to be tabled, or you don't strike out. And he was devastated, his very competitive kid.

He's crime. And I remember my god reaction was to say, fio don't cry. But I didn't. What I said is still IT socks that you just struck out in. The reason that you're sad is because you care so much about hitting the ball and being a good team a and you try so hard, you really wanted to hit IT.

And sometimes even the things that we practice and we try really hard and we want they don't go our way and you strike out sometimes that happens in baseball, it's going to happen in basketball, you're going to miss shots, it's going to happen with friends and it's okay to feel sad and it's okay to cry right now. And you're gonna get another shot and you're gonna another at bat and you can go back in there and try again. And of course, like many parents, we talked about how the best hitters, you know, they hit three hundred and they miss seven times and they hit IT three.

对， really overwriting that good reaction to be like, don't cry in replacing that with like you care deeply and that's why this hurts and that's okay and you don't have to beat yourself up. You can be sad but you shouldn't guilty or shame because you're trying to do something really hard, which is hit a baseball. And I think that more than anything, that's what I want to teach the o in ya is SHE ages in, and IT becomes appropriate in various context of their life.

Thank you so much blood. It's been a real treat chatting with you. And unluckily, we have so many things left over to talk about going to have to talk to again down the road. But thank you. I really appreciate.

Thank you.

William been a great pleasure. Nice to see you. All right, folks, thanks so much to rejoining me for this conversation with red style bug. If you wants to learn more from bread, I would definite encourage you to check out two of his books that I found very helpful. One is titled master of change, and the other is titled the practice of grounded ness.

Personally, if I want, is i've found the last few days pretty intense and chAllenging, partly because i'm record this one day before the U. S. Presidential election and partly, I guess, because yesterday a fire rect, the home of a very nice older couple living a couple of doors away from me.

So i've been thinking a lot about this question of how you maintain some degree of common equal libera amid the male stream of life. So I wanted to share with you one exercise from the practice of grounders red book. But I hope you can use if, like me, you're not finding this the easiest time in your life to maintain a sense of piece and calm.

Red describes this practice as a way to cultivate the lens of a wise observer. So i'm going to redo this page from chapter two of his book, the practice of grounded. And so excuse me, if IT takes a minute also, he says, rather than being so involved in whatever you are experiencing, IT can be useful to step back and view IT from a fire.

This helps create space between yourself and your situations so that you can accept IT and view IT more clearly. The lens of a wise observer can be cultivated via formal practice, and also by developing tools you can call up on in everyday life. So then he starts with the description of what he calls formal practice. And IT goes like this.

He says, title, lie down in a comfortable position set a timmer for anywhere between five and twenty minutes close your eyes and focus on your breath you can concentrate on the sensation of air moving in and out of your nostros s the rising and falling of your belly or any other place in your body where you feel that whenever your attention drifts away from your breath simply notice that IT is drifted and bring you back to the breath without the rating yourself for getting distracted once you settled in perhaps after a minute or two that sometimes longer imagine yourself as a life force that is separate from your thoughts, feelings and circumstances. Imagine you are awareness itself, the canvas upon which all of your thoughts, feelings and circumstances arrive, the container that holds everything you can also imagine your awareness is a blue sky and anything that pops up as clouds floating by. Look through the lens of awareness to see your thoughts, feelings and circumstances.

IT may start to feel as if you are watching a movie instead of being in IT. When you get distracted or caught up in your experience, note IT without judging yourself, and then return to concentrating on the sensation of your breath, moving through your body. Once you've stabilized your awning on your breath, go back to viewing your thoughts and feelings from a far let this awareness become a vesle to hold whatever IT is you are grappling with from this space, you can accept and see the situation clearly and thus make wise decisions.

The result of adopting this perspective is similar to the observer effect in quantum physics. When you change your relationship to what you are observing, the nature of what you are observing, changes, in this case chAllenges go from being permanent and discount to impermanent and manageable. Keep practicing.

You might notice the strong of the thought, feeling or your situation. The harder IT is to maintain space between IT and you're awareness of IT, but just a single degree of separation goes a long way. The more you practice, the more separation you'll be able to create under faster, you'll be able to zoom out when you find yourself converging with a chAllenging experience.

The more you strengthen the prospect of otherwise observer and formal practice, the more available IT will be to you in daily life. Anyway, so there IT, is that a page or so from brad starlink gs book? The practice of groundless IT comes from chapt to two, which is titled except where you are to get where you want to go.

I hope that he gives you a taste of his work and hopefully inspires you to buy his books and great more of his writing. I'll be back very soon with some more terrific guests, including a famous british investor named ed Terry Smith and a legendary american investor named bill priest, whose best known as a member of the barns round table. In the meantime, please feel RAID to follow me on exit, William Green, seventy two, and connect with me on linton.

As always, do let me know how you are liking the pod custom. Always really happy to hear from you until next time. Take good cap and stay well. Thank you for listening to T I, P.

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